Now that blogging for the Networks course has begun in earnest, we would like to introduce a “digest blog” that will run in parallel with the main class blog.

The motivation for a digest is simple. There is already a lot of interesting content on the class blog, much more will be coming, and we hope that you will try to follow what’s being posted. But given the volume of text, keeping up with everything is going to be a challenge, and so this parallel forum is designed to provide a quick overview of what’s going on in the class blog, with links to particular posts and comments on related resources.

We on the course staff will be producing regular posts to the digest, and we hope you’ll find this helpful in identifying useful and interesting information as it gets added to the class blog.

With this as introduction, here’s a first summary of what’s been happening on the class blog.

A number of posts focus on the role of social networks in different settings. penguins21 writes about They Rule, which maps the overlapping memberships of corporate boards of directors. This is a glimpse into an active area of sociological research on “corporate interlocks” — the study these overlapping board memberships and what they imply about influence and information flow in business and government. For a survey of this style of research, see for example Mark Mizruchi’s paper, What Do Interlocks Do?

The social networks that span different companies can be seen in many settings other than board interlocks. rr2001 discusses a study by Castilla, Hwang, Granovetter, and Granovetter of the social networks that underpin the business activity in Silicon Valley. For an example of this style of research taking place at Cornell, David Strang and Mary Still, who are involved with the Cornell Institute for the Social Sciences theme project on Networks this year, have done a number of studies of the ways in which information diffuses between companies, and the way in which it is related to the movement of people between these companies.

In a different direction, ba11k presents a network based on names that co-occur in chapters of the New Testament. The role of social networks in the early history of Christianity is also something that Laszlo Barabasi discusses briefly at the very beginning of his book Linked.

The speed at which information flows through on-line social networks is the subject of a post by bsc36, on the spread of anti-News-Feed petitions on Facebook in Fall 2006. As we discussed in lecture, systems like Facebook provide amazing sources of data for studying the dynamics of large-scale social network processes; for an example of a recent study on Facebook data, see Golder, Wilkinson, and Huberman’s paper, Rhythms of Social Interaction: Messaging within a Massive Online Network.

Finally, pnelson discusses networks built from the interactions among people and physical objects, using measurements enabled by technology such as RFID tags. The construction of such networks, and their analysis, is becoming an active topic of research; for example, Sandy Pentland discussed a project on this topic at the MIT Media Lab when he visited Cornell in the fall.